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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 13, 2007)
graphic novels Between the Hudson and the East Yick. Whoa! Yick. KOCKROACH by Tyler Knox. WILLIAM MORROW, 2007. HARDCOVER, $23.95. OK, let me be honest: I took a couple of classes with Tyler Knox. I believe Knox once drove me home from an Iowa Writers’ Workshop holiday party (not that I was in the workshop, just taking a class or two). So perhaps I shouldn’t be reviewing this clever new novel, another in what I’d call the “MFA graduate moves to New York and must dominate city by writing about it” genre. Because Knox has literary smarts, he dedicates this Metamorphosis- upended novel “For G.S.” One can only assume that’s Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, the man-become-cockroach. In Kockroach, however, the bug (species Blattella ger- manicus) wakes up human and, after doing some gross cockroachy eating things, names himself Jerry Blatta. Knox swiftly transforms the amusing reversal into a commentary on corruption, on the city, on human power — and on how an amoral insect might just become the most powerful person in the country. While that may or may not be a barb aimed at var- ious current politicians, the narrative itself brings to life a certain New York, the city of the 1950s, the Times Square (as one char- acter describes it) “of pinball palaces and shady dance clubs, of the grand old Sheraton-Astor and the fleabag junkie haunts that surrounded it, of the Broadway theaters where I never set foot and the Roxy Burlesque, with its second-rate strip- pers playing to a third-rate crowd … High heels and low brims, angry taunts and pearl-handled switchblades, jazz fiends looking for green, Benzedrine addicts look- ing for God.” That description goes on for many more words, the montage of images showing Knox’s research but also a style that brings Michael Chabon to mind far more than Franz Kafka. The tale quickly turns into a spooling out of Edward Hopper’s characters in Nighthawks — the people themselves becoming threads in Knox’s rather conventional depiction of gender relations and power dynamics. Kockroach is a mob tale, really, and a por- trait of the city with sly references to Jerry’s past life mixed in (for instance, he survives a huge conflagration — of course). It’s a clever idea and, if someone who has ridden in Knox’s car can say this, a generally fasci- nating ride. — Suzi Steffen 22 DECEMBER 13, 2007 DMZ VOL. 1-3: ON THE GROUND, BODY OF A JOURNALIST, PUBLIC WORKS by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli. DC/VERTIGO, 2006 & 2007. PAPERBACK, $9.99 EACH. New York City is a place that gets inside your head. Live there even for a lit- tle while, and you get attached to the place, where everyone has their own ver- sion of the same few blocks and there’s always something new to see. Brian Wood (whose Channel Zero you also ought to read) and Riccardo Burchielli’s DMZ, a spectacularly imagined series collected into three paperbacks so far, is a particular heartbreaker for a NYC-lover, all burned-out buildings and nightmarish blocks. In a bleak future, the U.S. has split; militias have taken over most of the country, calling themselves the Free States. The United States of America still holds New York City’s outer boroughs, and in the middle is the DMZ: Manhattan. It’s still a Manhattan of millions of stories and hundreds of small worlds, but little else is the same, as photographer Matty Roth finds out when his new Liberty News internship falls to pieces as soon as he lands in Manhattan. DMZ’s first volume, On the Ground, con- cerns Matty’s learning to live in the DMZ, meeting its residents and hearing their sto- ries, convincing Liberty News to take him seri- ously and coming to feel as if he can’t leave this strange, broken, wonderful place; the second, Body of a Journalist, is chiefly about Matty coming to understand the part he plays and the power he can, potentially, wield by using his connec- tions inside and out- side the DMZ. (Volume two also includes two separate, brief and wonderful pieces about life on the island.) The third vol- ume, Public Works, is a single story about Matty trying to get inside a Halliburton- like reconstruction company called Trustwell. It’s less immediately enthralling; it lacks the freshness and exploratory qualities of the first two collections, when Matty is still learning his way around, and its parallels to the war in Iraq seem almost too overt. But DMZ’s depiction of life in a war zone, of the way people fight to sur- vive and to help or hinder each other, is breathtaking. Wood’s sometimes eco- nomical, snappy writing and Burchielli’s inspired, fearless depictions of a brutal existence are vivid and textured. There’s something daring about making New York, which feels like it belongs to every- one, into no man’s land — except for these few men and women who tirelessly try to keep it ticking. — Molly Templeton
